June's Edges
by zunmo
Summary: London, and the heat and pressure of June rests on both their shoulders until moving seems a chore they don't even want to wonder the consequences of. A full moon and a bookshop under a little flat with white stucco walls. Post-Hogwarts, Remus/Sirius.


AN: It's summer. I had to. I have no idea how apartments look in London, but a lot of the apartments in Boston are similar to the one in this story. Sorry for mistakes in Briticisms :]

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The windows of the flat Remus and Sirius finally buy in London are rimmed in a dark, rich wood, and Sirius likes to leave them open so flies drift into the apartment and swirl around their heads with the morning breeze. It's impossible for them to fly their brooms in the middle of the city like this, impossible for them to do much more than put on records they've only just come to really love and dance wild and dark against the white stucco walls, and then quiet, soft into the dark collapsing around their shoulders.

Remus works downstairs in a dusty bookshop, and Sirius is off every day running order errands and at his supplementary desk job, and every month they take a few days off and drive for a long time in Peter's car out into the country, to a place far away from anywhere. Sirius still watches Remus transform through his big round dog-eyes, still watches every bone pop and stretch and sees the final second of indescribable, heart-breaking pain on Remus' face before his snout elongates and he is gone. Sirius has watched every transformation since the middle of sixth year, and he is trying so hard to understand.

Moony turns his yellow, glowing yellow, yield-sign yellow, eyes on Padfoot and they are both far gone over the fields already.

So they run all night, and it's a little ridiculous how it feels beautiful even though this shouldn't be, even though this should be the ugliest thing in the world. Maybe it's because the concrete walls and flashing nighttime lights of London might even be dead for both of them, or maybe that they're sick of being in a crowd on the commute, or that the old Russian woman downstairs should really be across the street, maybe in a cottage, maybe a cottage across from their own cottage of their own.

So they run all night long and when Moony finally collapses two hours or so before the sunrise Padfoot is never as tired as he expects he will be. Usually he will sit, then, and watch Monny twisted into a bundle on the ground, bones and organs and flesh curled tight together.

When Remus wakes up Sirius patches him together and they get back into Peter's car and drive back, back to the concrete walls and college students cooking on sterno cans in their bedsits, to their apartment, and Remus sleeps for a while and then they dance again.

Then Remus sleeps some more, and Sirius does not watch him because normal people do not watch their lovers sleep, and because it's boring, because all that Remus does is breathe. Sometimes he will go and sit on the edge of the bed, though, and comb his fingers through Remus' hair ("Your mother was right, it's getting stupid Moony." "Well, then I guess I have stupid hair and a stupid boyfriend to match." and it was so lame Sirius didn't care). And sometimes Sirius traces the inkblots Remus lets soak into the skin of his fingers, into the crook of his elbow and, somehow, on the curved plane of his stomach. And sometimes he kisses the scars that run across the tops of his forearms and wind their way up into the sleeves on his stupid matching duck pajamas.

In the morning, Remus wakes up and goes downstairs to the dusty little bookshop where teenaged girls with big glasses come in and ask him for Yeats and businessmen come in and ask for romance novels ('for their wives'). Sirius sleeps in, and the edges of June flutter against the curtains James' mum has made for them, and the heat coils on the windowpanes and between the cracks in the floorboards without waiting for permission.

The teenaged girls blush when Sirius stumble downstairs later with his hair all rumpled to the right, but never the left, and his shirt buttoned wrong, and sigh a little, dreamily, when Remus kisses the tip of his nose and side of his chin when he thinks they aren't looking. Remus fixes Sirius' shirt carefully, and gives him a paper bag with his lunch in it and ignores Sirius' grumbles that he is not ten, and pushes him out the door before Sirius can give him a big, wet, embarrassing kiss that he will secretly enjoy, just a little.

So the streets are too narrow and winding in front of Sirius, and he cannot wait to trip home that evening and touch the tips of his fingers to the hem of Remus' shirt and tell him, about how the sunlight bounces off the storefront at exactly seven o'clock, and how even the street signs sweat under the pressure of the English summer, and how the tomatoes he us growing on the windowsill are baking their apartment the color of afternoons spent by the lake at Hogwarts and the small noise Remus makes whenever Sirius finishes reading him a poem at stupid in the morning.

AN: Review?


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